Bobby Garfield

Blind Willie says nothing. He is thinking of the baseball glove, how he erased BOBBY GARFIELD—as well as you could erase ink from leather, anyway—and then printed Willie Shearman’s name in its place.

Willie remembers erasing Bobby’s name from the stolen baseball glove.

Sorrow? But she was still smiling. If it was sorrow she felt, why was she smiling? “Bobby Garfield. He was my first boyfriend. My first love, I guess you could say. He and Sully and I were best friends back then.

Carol identifies Bobby as her first boyfriend and childhood friend with Sully.

… On an afternoon in the last summer before the year 2000, Bobby Garfield came back to Harwich, Connecticut. He went to West Side Cemetery first, where the actual memorial service took place at the Sullivan family plot. Old …

The adult Bobby returns to Harwich and the Sullivan memorial service.

A Joe Hardy kind of boy. Bobby Garfield walked between them, his momentary depression forgotten. It was his birthday and he was with his friends and life was good.

Bobby walks between Carol and John Sullivan on his birthday.

I like the way Sully John reappeared. Question: Will Roland Deschain and his friends ever meet Bobby Garfield’s pal, Ted Brautigan? And just who are those low men chasing the old Tedster, anyway? More and more my work feels like a slanted trough where everything eventually drains into Mid-World and End-World.

The fictionalized writer diary explicitly discusses Bobby Garfield’s friendship with Ted Brautigan. This is a narrative-frame/book-character reference, not Bobby appearing in the Tower action.

… I knew that business about the six-year plan, and re-upping if we wanted to, was what my friend Bobby Garfield and his friend Sully-John would have called just a shuck and jive. Not that we could read it in their thoughts. They were all wearing hats, you see.

Ted remembers Bobby and Sully-John’s expression while recounting captivity.

Harwich had been a pleasant, tree-filled suburb when Sully lived there as a kid, chumming with Bobby Garfield and Carol Gerber. Now his old home town was one of those places you didn’t go at night, just a grimy adjunct to Bridgeport.

Sully remembers growing up in Harwich with Bobby and Carol.